Broken, but not beaten
by Kaisa Del'Armago
Summary: The WEAPONs had a job to do and by Gaia, they were going to do it. With or without each other, and regardless of if they had their Gaia-given forms.
1. Chapter 1

_Eyes were closed, and as they drifted... They dreamed. _

_They dreamed of ancient civilizations, of wars beyond counting and the era of peace that had been forged and given into the care of the Cetra and of the nightmare that had come after countless millennia spent cultivating the world back into a verdant state of lush, mad growth. They dreamed of the weapons that had been forged out of the souls of those who had wished nothing more than an end to the fighting, those whom had turned on their own people and brought a force of arms to bear that had flooded continents and reshaped the land. _

_They dreamed of pain, of gathering all of the resentment and hatred in one place to halt the flow of undead and knew not what the passage of time meant but most importantly, they slept. They drifted, out of touch with the rest of the world and buoyed by currents unseen as they sang their quiet lullaby and dragged down the one thing that could not pass on with them into the comforting darkness of oblivion._

_And then one day, a horrible rending and tearing pain of the seal being removed woke them up._

* * *

The splitting headache was -not- worth this. One yellow, slitted eye remained and was narrowed against the pain as a slender hand covered the hole over where the other had been. A hole largely closed and covered with the thin film of an eyelid, but one that still _hurt_. The salt water had cleaned the wound while he had washed up on the shore, covered only by the long golden hair that had fanned out over him like a blanket. It had been reflexive, pulling his diminishing essence down into a compacted form as he sank beneath the comforting embrace of the waves.

Those insolent, idiotic humans! He didn't _care_ about them, he had only wanted to find the Calamity-tainted creatures and drag them to the North Crater. He wouldn't have even surfaced if they hadn't decided to _shoot_ him. No, oh no his goal had been to dive down to where the presence had been strongest, tear it out of the ground and be about his merry way. Idiot that he had been, he had decided to coast along the surface for a time to learn the lay of the land, wrapped in the nostalgia of when the world had been consumed by towering trees that dappled the water with sunlight strained through their boughs.

It had only been natural, for him to retaliate and defend himself. He was a -weapon-, not a saint after all, but even he'd had enough when he had been shot point-blank in the face. He wouldn't forgive them. He _couldn't_ forgive them. If he had to, he would cleanse the world of every one of those vermin the exact same way he had helped to purge the world the last time before it had been trusted to the Cetra.

He had failed. The Cetra had failed. It was time for the world to be freed of the sin of sentience.

* * *

He'd _had_ them, until that bloody canon on that city had fired. While he didn't quite have a hole in his chest any more (the wonders of having rearranged himself into his original form) it still -hurt-, and breathing was a hassle. A necessity, but a hassle. In the interest of subtlety he had slipped down and hidden in one of the crevices that dotted the landscape around the city that sported the canon, hoping to wait out any that might have wanted to search his corpse and make his way to the town under the relative safety of darkness. Far be it for him to streak buck naked across the landscape and get hailed as that crazy person with a dent in their chest.

Insects wriggled and small rodents skittered as silver eyes with slitted pupils watched them, the albino man who's face they were set into resting his chin on a hand and sighing as he settled in and practiced patience. Idly, he puffed a breath to the side and disturbed some of the long, swept back white hair that had drifted over to tickle the side of his face and chest.

No, this would -not- do. He'd had _one_ job, and that was to find where the Calamity had gone. He could have sworn he had sensed her at that city, and lo and behold some of it had come out and fought him. All he'd had to do was capture it and look where he was now! There had to be another way, and by Gaia, he'd find it. He could blend in. He could track it down, use it's own tactics against it and corral it back into the Northern Crater and then sit on it for another millennia until the planet was ready to digest and dissolve it. He could do this.

Or so he hoped.

* * *

Taking a human form had been difficult. Not impossible, just difficult. There had been a few moments of agonizing pain after the crash before he had been able to properly exert his will and wear the skin he had been born with a lifetime ago. Of course, that left him naked and laying in the bottom of a crater, surrounded by shed scales and panels of armor that had broken off on impact, but he felt confident that he had managed to at least look relatively normal. An exhausting crawl had brought him into a humid jungle that was reminiscent of the verdant foliage that had once ruled the planet, and from there he found a pool of water that he could check himself by.

Dusky skin. Long, silky black hair. A nose that came to a fine point and high cheekbones that gave an aristocratic tilt to his eyes-

His faintly glowing red eyes, where the only suggestion of pupils that revealed themselves were swirls of orange. A brief rest and he would try again to 'humanize', but for now... Trying to push himself up and hissing as his legs continued to refuse to support him, he gave up and instead dug into the bank to expose white roots and tubers that he knew were edible.

He would be able to survive in this, the last bastion of a time long passed, while he recovered. He knew he wouldn't like it, but really he didn't have much of a choice. The hardest part would be stifling the urge to kill every human he came across for the indignity of his death.

* * *

Lime green eyes with black slitted pupils stared sadly up at the sky as windblown sand drifted around him. His arms hurt, but his hands... He couldn't move his fingers more than a little bit. He'd never wanted this. He -liked- people, and so when the seal had been broken and released them from their vigil he had gone to where he could watch them. The shiny, well lit buildings had drawn his attention, and so to try and avoid scaring people he had buried himself beneath the warm sands with only his head exposed and watched in delight as they continued to enjoy their fireworks and games.

But then, some of the Calamity had found him and fought him, and thought it hurt him to hurt the people with the Calamity-touched he'd had to. So he defended himself, burning with fire and sweeping with wind, sending the two away and focusing on that one Calamity-touched person that had hacked and slashed, breaking his fingers and slaying him.

Or, mostly slaying him, at least. An explosion of sand and wind had given him enough cover to dig down and hide, nursing his wounds and pulling the skin of the ginger-haired youth he had once been across his diminished form and trying to make himself as non-existent as possible. Of course, now he could probably go to the shiny, firework-prone place and see them closer but he was sad now. He hadn't tried to hurt anyone! Why had they hunted him down? He'd left them alone and they had still come for him.

It wasn't fair. It wasn't nice or kind of them. These humans weren't _anything_ like the Cetra had been. But... Maybe that was just because of the Calamity-touched that had been with them? Maybe, they were being mislead! Maybe they would give back the flower he had found and liked and protected. He'd have to think about it, but in the meantime the sand was warm and the sky was blue.

* * *

She would have cried if she'd had the eyes to. All she had wanted, was to be left alone to search. Oh, she had known that the humans were ignorant and that they weren't _entirely_ to blame, Because of this, instead of razing the town that had shot her companion in the face she had searched the waters for where his body might have gone. Pieces of it had been floating in the crater below but...

She had to find him, so that she could protect him until he was fully healed. So she searched, and searched, and eventually was waylaid by the Calamity-touched. The pressure of the deep didn't seem to do anything to them, and it didn't matter how many times she hit them with beams of energy they remained and blinded her. It didn't -matter- that she used other senses to navigate, it -hurt-, and she needed them to help search for her companion!

It was as she drifted, broken, along the currents that she came to the conclusion that he had been right to doubt that the Cetra could manage the world. She had been such an advocate for sentient life, such a _fool_, that she had made him agree to giving them a chance... And now she was paying for it. She, who hadn't attacked them, she who had only wanted to find her oldest friend and mentor, who's goodwill had been betrayed...!

No. She wouldn't fade away. She had one form she hadn't been killed in, and so her essence gathered and compacted. Short sandy brown hair, one blue eye and one yellow, both with round pupils and dulled by the thick grey film that rendered both healing orbs useless. She -would- keep her promise, she _would_ find him, and when she did... She would apologize. She had been wrong to trust.

And so, she drifted up towards the surface and washed up along the beach, bitter and mourning the loss of her innocent naivety.

* * *

One gold eye and one blue eye stared blankly at the reflection in the pool of purified lifestream. Oval glasses framed them, while long red hair was tied up in a ponytail with the bangs left loose. She was partially leaned out of a capsule of some kind, a mechanical arm dangling from one shoulder as the other reached up to pluck the glasses away. A purple, black and blue two-piece otherwise clad the body in coordination with the mini skirt that swathed her nethers, and the building pressure and pain within the torso indicated there was more wrong than what met the eye.

Carefully, she reached and tore the metal arm away, letting out a low, rasping hiss as wisps of black coiled through the air and wove new flesh from the stump of a shoulder. It was pale flesh, ghastly and grey like the dead and tipped with short, curved claws that gently raked across the abdomen and tore out the offending inorganic objects that had been embedded within.

Hmm, that one looked like a kidney. The tubing there _must_ have doubled for a small intestine, and _that_ must have been a lung. Slipping out of the heeled shoes (really, why did people _wear_ those?) while the body repaired itself to a functional level she carefully crossed the pool of mako and surveyed the rubble around her. She had questions, and maybe it could answer some of them. A glance up revealed a star-lit sky as a human hand reached up to scritch through the hair idly.

There had been a battle. She vaguely recalled that. Something about ascension, Omega being forced to manifest and the wave of regret she had felt from him when he was forced to try and leave the planet, controlled by... Controlled by...

Something about white? There! In the sky! Part of Omega lingered, out of range of the Planet and thus unable to break back down into the lifestream. Which... Reminded her. There was a very important question she had to address. _Where were the souls of those who refused to pass on?_

A quick check of her chest turned up an utter lack of the protomateria, which meant that it was hopefully still with them, shackling them in her absence. As much as she hated the damn thing it was certainly an effective proxy for when she was out of it. That thought brought more questions, some of them old, some of them new. Where was here? Why was she animating a fleshbag? Why did she need it to anchor herself? It hadn't been dead yet, but it might as well have been. It was... Offputting, to be alone in her own head for the first time that she could remember in... Practically forever.

Still, at least she was functional and aware even if the lingering echo of pain through her essence led her to believe that her awakening hadn't exactly been peaceful or pleasant. It rarely ever was, when one factored in her purpose. For now, she would recycle what energy she had and adjust the body until she could move around without having to worry about it splitting open under the strain of the movement. Until it was capable of doing this thing, however, she would simply move very, very carefully and climb out of this pit lined with twisted, sharp metal and lifestream.

Purpose in mind, the living corpse of Shalua Rui picked her way to the closest wall and gingerly began to climb.

* * *

_The beginning of the drabbles for the companion piece of Twelve 1/35 Soldiers. Updates are likely to be slow, but please read and review.  
Bonus points if you figure out why the sections are in the order they're in.  
Onwards and upwards, as they say.  
-KD_


	2. Chapter 2

"Do you know why it is, that the Chaos within you screams and fights?"

Vincent's head came up, one hand drifting to the gun holstered at his side. The voice echoed through the Crystal Cavern, coming from somewhere deeper. Somewhere hidden by the countless pillars and columns that supported the deceptively vast structure. There was a familiar tone to it, though there was a thick enough rasp to it that it was difficult to discern who, exactly, it was. Pushing himself to his feet, he settled into a patient, guarded stance as he studied the area around him.

A shadow flit between the columns, near the ceiling.

"You don't, do you. You only see the effects, not the cause, though I was led to believe that you understood at least _some_ of that human's research."

The shadow flit between two more pillars, darting slightly closer to observe him with an eye that glowed gold in the dark. It was fast, and by the time he had the gun up and out it was already gone with the quiet scrape of claws across stone and snap of displaced air. The gunman remained still, stretching his senses out as he remained alert.

"Tell you what. Bring me things, and I'll teach you. I know an awful lot about this topic, after all, and it physically _hurts_ to watch you flounder about uselessly the way you have been."

Claws ticka-tacked against the stone off to his right, and the ex-turk turned slowly yo watch a glowing gold eye watching him as it carefully made it's way across the space between two columns a fair distance back. It was faster than that, so he reasoned it must be testing his reactions, gauging his intent just as much as he was observing it, and slowly lowered the gun. This was not something that felt threatened by him, and there was a familiarity to it that had Vincent comparing what he could see of the profile to any number of sentient-seeming monsters he was aware of.

"I want clothes, first. Baggy pants, a very large shirt, and a shawl if you can manage it. As much as your cape might prove useful to you, I'd much rather look as passibly normal as I can. I'll also want sunglasses. When you return with them, I'll start teaching you."

The gold eye closed, and by the time the gunman had made his way over there was no sign of his unusual visitor.

* * *

It took him two weeks to finally procure what it was that his nameless visitor had asked for. It certainly wasn't due to any sort of inability to get what it was that was asked for. No, what delayed him was the deliberation as to whether or not he should trust this thing. A brief conversation with Reeve had prompted him to be careful, but encouraged him to comply for the time being. The worst that could happen was that this thing tried to kill him, the immortal man, and failed.

Laying out the items in the middle of the Crystal Cavern, Vincent shifted back and folded his arms, tucking his chin down as he waited. It didn't take long before he caught sight of the glowing gold eye in the shadows of one of the columns, and the vaguely humanoid form ticka-tacked to the edge of the shadows to peer at and inspect the items from afar.

"Well now, look at that. You humans _can_ be reasoned with, after all. Clever of you, to put them so far out. I did say that if you brought them, I'd teach you though now didn't I. I neglected to mention anything about where you would drop them off, so that one's on me. I'm rather new to this, so you'll have to forgive me some few oversights."

The golden eye closed before the clothing on the floor vanished, and off in the shadows there was the quiet sound of rustling cloth. The sound ceased and that singular golden eye re-opened in another patch of shadow.

"Much better. Not that I much care about nakedness, but clothing makes it easier to seem... Less like a monster. Something I'm sure you're familiar with. A promise is a promise."

The eye shifted, claws scraping idly along the ground as the odd conversationalist paced behind a column and across the darkened expanse between it and the next one and then back to it's original point. Pausing, it turned to study him, and rumbled.

"Chaos, as you are aware, is a soul wrought of terra corrupt. It is the vessel, the container for those souls that cannot pass on. Unfulfilled desires, grievances, the extreme end of the emotional spectrum that makes for a restless soul and prevents that specter from being reabsorbed and reintegrated into the lifestream. You may view this as evil, but it has a purpose. When there are enough of these souls, this means that there is a problem across the planet. If everyone is dying and being left with regrets, after all, that means they viewed their death as greatly unfair. There is no peace in that, and hatred is a poison that the planet cannot afford."

The figure shifted, moving as if to lean against the nearby column and sighing.

"And so, Chaos came to be. A creature designed to hold these souls, to hunt down the reason they cannot pass on, to fulfill their final wishes. That's why it's called Chaos, you see, because the average person cannot discern why it is that there are many Chaos would kill, and others Chaos will aid. You humans, after all, are generally selfish creatures. You don't usually want your dying wish to be that someone else succeeds. No, it's far more likely that it will be something along the lines of 'this bastard raped and killed me, he must die'. Or some other manner of being screwed out of something, and desiring vengeance."

It shook it's head, before the glowing gold eye closed.

"That, is your lesson for today."

* * *

_"I wonder who this person is. How many more meetings do you think it might take before they trust you enough to get closer and identify them?"_

Vincent's brows furrowed as he frowned, though Reeve couldn't possibly see that over the phone. "... Possibly two to three. They don't self-identify as a human. Have you had luck narrowing down the search?"

_"Not yet. Nobody's been seen with the clothing you gave to them. Any luck searching the area?"_

"None. Whatever this is, it is both fast and quiet." The ex-turk looked towards the cave hidden by the waterfall, eyes narrowing as a glint of gold caught his eye. "I will call you back."

_"Vincent-?"_

The gunman tucked the phone away, and made his way back into the cave.

* * *

"You're paying attention to the wrong things, you know."

The voice came from above him, and he refrained from glancing up as he caught sight of the glowing golden eye in the shadows across the chamber. It was at the edge of the light given off from the pillar of crystalized mako standing in the center of the pool of water that dominated the main chamber. It's humanoid shape was crouched, frame largely obscured by the shawl and seemed to be tilting it's head to the side.

The other eye was an ever so faintly luminescent yellow-green, though it didn't blaze as brightly as the other. Vincent moved towards the pool and tracked it's movment as it stood and ticka-tacked back. Five and a half feet tall, the gunman guessed, and slowed his pace to see if it would keep a set distance between them or retreat completely. It didn't stop, slipping around one of the columns and leaning to poke it's head around the other side.

"I'm hardly a threat to you. With all the restless souls within you that can't die, it's not as if you can pass on either."

"What do you want." The ex-turk had no problem keeping his voice neutral, even going so far as to duck his head slightly as if that might make him seem less threatening, though he lifted it again as the figure sticking to the shadows let out a soft laugh.

"You won't like it. Are you sure this is the conversation you want to have before I flit away again?"

"... I am." Vincent tracked the odd conversation partner as it picked it's way around another column and poked it's head around enough to watch him once more. The yellow-green eye was lost to the darkness, giving it the appearance of having only the singular glowing gold one.

"Disarm then. As much as it won't do anything permanent to me, I'd much rather not have to bother with putting myself back together. Fleshbags are very... Inconvienient, that way."

The gunman's eyes narrowed, remaining still for a long moment. Taking that as his answer, the figure laughed softly once more and slipped further into the cavern.

"Whenever you're ready, then..."

* * *

It took another two weeks of futile searching through the cavern and turning up nothing but more pillars and caves that led down into pitch darkness before he stood before of Lucretia's tomb, rifle and handgun propped up against the wall behind him where the exit to the cave let in a slight breeze. He was unsurprised by the faint clack of metal on stone that came from them, and turned slowly to watch the shawl-clad figure's back as it poked at his weapons and studied them. Able to view it properly in the light, he was surprised by how human it looked at first glance.

Of course, anything beyond that would reveal the whipcord thin tail that shifted and curled just above the floor along with the bottoms of two wings that seemed to have tucked up under the shawl. Red-brown hair, unkempt and long, draped across the back of the shawl and shifted slightly as it glanced over it's shoulder and then casually turned to face him, straightening out of it's crouch. Out of _her_ crouch.

Shalua Rui stared back at him, face split and cracked along the corners of the mouth to give the wider jaw more room to open and display pointed teeth. Her blue eye, back-lit by a faint golden glow that made it appear yellow-green, watched him along with the blazing gold eye that rested within what had previously been an empty socket. A quick glance showed that the arm that had previously been mechanical in nature was now muscular, organic and a dead grey-white, tipped with black claws.

"I know. Horribly uneven, isn't it. Imagine my surprise when I woke up with it. The worst part, was that the insides were all wrong. I had to cut them out, otherwise the body would have just kept rejecting them and hurting and dying all over again." She rumbled, tracing the claws hand across where the shawl covered her stomach, before tilting her head to the side. "Your anger is exactly why I was hesitant. It's not as if I asked for this, no more than you did. Your human did something to me, and I'm still trying to puzzle out how to reverse it."

"Give her back."

She snorted at that, tail shifting and lashing soundlessly through the air behind her as she shook her head and paced away from the entrance, circling around the gunman and opening the path to his weapons. "As soon as I can figure out how to, without both of us dying, I will. The last time I tried, I began to dissipate so long as I'm bound to it, I'm safe. And she's safe. You know what my healing factor's like, after all."

The ex-turk watched her warily, eyes narrowing as he put together pieces he hadn't wanted to before. He shifted a slight step towards his weapons before she crouched low and then vanished with the scrape of claws against stone, the sound repeated further into the cavern as she latched onto part of a wall and left only words behind.

"I think that's quite enough of being stared at like I'm some monster. Until next time, Host of my Burden."

* * *

_Upwards and onwards, as always,  
-KD_


End file.
